The V-genesis patch is a most important milestone in the evolution of computer programming, from its troglodyte state prior to the involvement of The Most Serene Republic, towards its civilised state as you enjoy it today.

For the first time in the century or so of history of this particular human endeavour, text was deliberately structured with due consideration given not only to its meaning, but also to its source, and to its context. Prior attempts at structuring software, at first consisting of a naive approach focused on meaning only, over time added a half-hearted consideration of context, very unequally and rather haphazardly. The change the V-genesis introduced is exactly like the move from understanding and controlling movement in terms of mass and somewhat velocity, such as it occurs in the mind of a monkey throwing rocks, to understanding and controlling movement in terms of mass, impulse and energy, such as it occurs in the launching of satellites. The proposition that there is still room for improvement in the endless march of human thought, on this topic as on any other, is absolutely indubitable. The proposition that the sum total of what came before can be compared with this particular advance is strictly ridiculous.

Used together with specialised scripts, V-genesis allows an agent to reconstruct a complete Bitcoin tree, verify its correctness, and manage his investment of trust at all junctures so that he is never required to implicitly trust either an unknown code author, or a code snippet of unknown provenance.

There remains after today no alternative manner to deploy Bitcoin software, or indeed any software that is not a toy intended to be used by children playing, outside of this paradigm. May the switchover be bloody and painful in all the right places.

The engine of the entire thing is quoted below, for your viewing pleasure :

The whole shebang is available either from the aforementioned mailing list, or directly hereii. Congrats to Stan for his tireless effectuality, and always remember :

Learn the code ; for the code will set you free.

PS. The only thing this needs in terms of packages is 'python-gnupg'.iii

———

Quoth Knuth (TUGboat, Volume 11/1990, No. 4) :

The current version number for TEX is 3.1, and for METAFONT it is 2.7. If corrections are necessary, the next versions of TEX will be 3.14, then 3.141. then 3.1415. . . . , converging to the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter; for METAFONT the sequence will be 2.71. 2.718, . . . , converging to the base of natural logarithms. I intend to be fully responsible for all changes to these systems for the rest of my life. I will periodically study reports of apparent bugs, and I will decide whether changes need to be made. Rewards will be paid to the first finders of any true bugs, at my discretion. but I can no longer afford to double the size of the reward each year. Whenever I have created a new version, I will put it in the official master T archive which currently resides at Stanford University. At the time of my death, it is my intention that the then-current versions of 7&X and METAFONT be forever left unchanged, except that the final version numbers to be reported in the "banner" lines of the programs should become TeX, Version $\pi$ and METAFONT, Version $e$ respectively. From that moment on, all "bugs" will be permanent "features."

[...] home cooking computing paradigm has been the only tenable method of sane computer operation since 2015 and will remain the case moving forward. The tools and training we provide clients accelerate their [...]